"I Will Never Trust Anyone Again" (Or: Why You Can’t Buy Trust in One Shot)

A lesson in Personal Market Fit from a 4th-grade girl, Brené Brown, and Simon Sinek.

Trust is like a Marble Jar

It is every parent's nightmare. Your daughter, a 4th grader, comes home from school shattered. She throws her backpack in anger, her eyes red from crying. She had shared a "guarded" secret with two best friends during recess. By lunch? The entire class knew. Everyone laughed, pointed fingers, and made her into a joke.

In a child's terms, this is a world collapse. It’s a boycott. It is a stinging betrayal in the softest underbelly. She looks at her mother and announces solemnly: "I will never trust people again."

And rightly so. In that moment, the world feels like a place where you can't rely on anything.

So, how do you rebuild trust? Often in life - whether we want to advance our career, our business, or our relationship - we think trust is built in the big moments. In huge promises, in ironclad contracts, or in grand, one-time gestures. But the truth is, trust isn't a logical decision. It is a feeling. As Simon Sinek says, "I feel trust." And like any deep emotion, it isn't created in a day.

When exactly did you fall in love? Simon Sinek asks a beautiful question that illustrates this perfectly: Try to remember the exact moment you knew you loved your partner. The answer is almost always: There is no such moment. It didn't happen on your anniversary, nor on a vacation in Rome. It happened in a million little moments in between. When you made them coffee in the morning without being asked, when they listened to you after a terrible day at work, when you compromised for each other on that small thing. Love, like trust, is an accumulation. Like a flywheel, one day you wake up and realize this feeling is stronger and more stable than anything else. It is greater than the sum of its parts.

Brené Brown’s Jar Researcher Brené Brown gives this a precise visual image: "The Marble Jar." She describes teachers who keep a jar in the classroom: for every small good deed - a marble is added. for every hurt or violation - one is removed. The principle is simple: We don't give our hearts to someone because of a "big promise" (a one-time event). We give it to those who have collected marbles with us, one by one, over time.

This is the foundation of Personal Market Fit In the Personal Market Fit model, we are building the "product" that is us. Like any successful product, we need to address two sides: One side is our "Why" (our purpose, our fulfillment), and the other is the Business Value (livelihood/income). This doesn't have to happen in the same place. Just as a magazine gives free articles to readers (Value) but makes money from ads (Business Value), our personal lives operate on different models too: It can be "Time-Sharing" - working in tech for a living, and volunteering for a non-profit for the soul. It can be adjacent, and in the perfect scenario - it can be in the same place.

But - and this is a big but - no matter how your model is built, the currency is always the same: Trust.

Whether you want your boss to value you (Livelihood), or you want to lead a community voluntarily (Why) - no one will follow you if your jar is empty. Your "Market" - whether it's customers, managers, family, or hobby partners - won't connect with your product if they don't feel that trust, the kind built by small marbles.

It doesn't happen by yelling "Follow me!" We, the managers of our own lives, tend to think it's different for us. That in the adult world, things are settled by the power of authority or contracts. Well, they aren't.

• You build the infrastructure for your success when you stop an employee in the hallway, ask sincerely how his mother's medical treatment is going - and remember the answer two days later.

• You build it when you back someone up when they make a mistake, instead of sacrificing them.

• You build it when you truly listen, instead of just waiting for your turn to speak.

Trust, it turns out, is not a lightning strike. It is a collection of small, transparent, and simple marbles. And it is the necessary condition for any model of success in life.

So, do a little inventory check and ask yourself: How many marbles did you put in their jar this week?